Frontier(words and music: Jamie Field)

In my heart and in my dreamsI move through an AmericaLearnt from the silver screenUnder rain and under sunI travel on the frontierTo find out how the west was wonClose your eyes, close your eyes, close your eyes,Close your eyes, close your eyes, close your eyes.

frontier n. 1a the border between two countries. b the district on each side of this. ...3 (in the US) the borders between settled and unsettled country.

Circles Of Fire(words and music: Jamie Field)

What more can I do?What can I say?The girl with the world at her feet,Kicked it away And you move in circles of fire You move in circles of fire You move in circles of fire I've seen you dance in the flames...So what is it like?This place of your own?Holding the key to your heart,When nobody's home. And you move in circles of fire You move in circles of fire You move in circles of fire I've seen you dance in the flames... Here we go, Fingers crossed one more time guess it's for show And oh you are so naive. Believe what you want to believe.You were the dreamThe girl to go farBut the girl with the dream lost her wayLeft behind bars And you move in circles of fire You move in circles of fire You move in circles of fire I've seen you dance in the flames... Here we go, Fingers crossed one more time guess it's for show And oh you are so naive. Believe what you want to believe.

'Circles of Fire' reflects how easily dreams and expectations can become disappointments, especially if friends aren't chosen wisely and one ends up moving in the wrong circles.Evelyn, Jamie and Andy originally recorded Circles Of Fire with Nigel Hooton on lead guitar back in the winter of 2003/2004, but decided that recording was done at too slow a tempo, so it was shelved. It's in the archives up at the Goatshed.This new recording is different in many ways; stripped back and closely reflecting the arrangement we used when performing the song live.The song was released as a download 'single' on March 26th 2012.

The first of three haunting instrumentals improvised by Wendy and Colin, inspired by American composers and using musical themes from the album.

Dust Bowl Bride(words and music: Jamie Field)

Pity the girl, who marries the manWho’s handsome, its true, but is wed to his landPicture the girl, she’s just seventeen,Pretty as sunrise, the tumbleweed queen She’s a dust…. Dust bowl bride. She’s a dust…. Dust bowl bride.

There’s news on the wire, there are words in the wind,That a darkness is coming that’s darker than sin.Black clouds are gathering, beginning to spin,Electricity flickers and charges her skin. She’s a dust…. Dust bowl bride. She’s a dust…. Dust bowl bride.So let’s get this straight, is it madness or fate?That drives the girl onwards that so dominates,There’s no grain in the store, no food on her plate,But leaving is something she won’t contemplate. She’s a dust…. Dust bowl bride. She’s a dust…. Dust bowl bride.And this charming young girl, in the sad dishcloth dressIs still trying to claw her way out of this mess,She’s been left on her own, but this Okie princess,Won’t admit failure she won’t acquiesce. She’s a dust…. Dust bowl bride. She’s a dust…. Dust bowl bride.

Rhonda and the Paper Crane(words and music: Jamie Field)

Down at The Waterfront, the fly girls tilt and dance the night away,While Rhonda folds a paper crane, and hopes it’s not too late to save the day.And in the background on the TV, is the face of JFK,But no-one’s paying much attention and someone says “Where’s Cuba anyway?”

‘Rhonda and The Paper Crane’ has its genesis in a completely different piece. I was writing a song called ‘Brighter Than The Sun’ about the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6th August. During my reading for this I came upon the story of Sadako Sasaki, a Japanese girl who lived near Misasa Bridge in Hiroshima, and who was only two years old when the atomic bomb was dropped on her city. She was hospitalised in January 1955 with leukemia, a direct result of the bombing.On August 3, 1955, the hospital was sent a gift of one thousand origami paper cranes donated by the people of Nagoya as a "Get Well" gift. Inspired by the cranes, Sadako started folding some herself spurred on by the Japanese saying that one who folded a thousand cranes was granted a wish. Though she had plenty of free time during her days in the hospital to fold the cranes, she lacked paper. She would use medicine wrappings and whatever else she could scrounge up.A popular version of the story is that she fell short of her goal, having folded only 644 before her death on October 25th 1955, and that her friends completed the 1,000 and buried them all with her.Sadako has become a leading symbol of the impact of a nuclear war, and is a heroine for many young girls in Japan.I didn’t complete the writing of ‘Brighter Than The Sun’ realising that it didn’t really fit within the scope of American Images, but I couldn’t get the story of Sadako and the paper cranes, out of my head.

It was in the early autumn of 1962, with the advent of the Cuban Missile Crisis, that the United States came closest to experiencing what it must have been like in Hiroshima on that clear August day in 1945.In her book: “Awaiting Armageddon: How Americans Faced the Cuban Missile Crisis.” Alice L. George tells of how U.S. citizens absorbed the nightmare scenario unfolding on their television sets. An estimated ten million Americans fled their homes; millions more prepared shelters at home, clearing the shelves of supermarkets and gun stores.And of course much of that fear was fueled by the fact that Americans now knew exactly what the consequences of nuclear war were, they’d seen it when they’d destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Rhonda and the Paper Crane is set in small US town in October 1962 and is about the response of a teenage girl to the unfolding crisis.The ‘newsreader’ on the track is M.J. Gray, a native of Kentucky but now living in the NW of the UK.

L.A. Aria has been through more time warps than the StarShip Enterprise! I wrote it in 3:4. We tried it briefly in 4:4. Then we recorded a version at the GoatShed with the whole song in 5:4. Finally we reverted to the original 3:4 where the song, to me anyway, always felt happiest – though we have kept the bridge in 5:4. Looking back, I’m wondering why we didn’t try it in 13:8 – or maybe we did!It’s one the earliest songs written for the project – second I think, after ‘This Trail Of Tears.’The subject of the song does not cover any new ground – the lure of Hollywood on naïve country girls who find a rude awakening on the West Coast, together with the triumph of superficiality over substance that is Los Angeles.For every wannabe who does succeed there are tens of thousands who don’t make it, and many of these fall prey to the sharks who feed in the waters of that disappointment.The song is not, however totally bleak. The narrator, or ‘observer’ in this piece, hints that there is someone who rises above it above all, who is true to herself and isn’t prepared to play, the Hollywood game. Someone, therefore, who stands out from the crowd.

One of the poems we received in response to our newsletter request for items was a short poem called ‘The Scissored Ground’ written by Rachel Schroeder who lives in Hendersonville, Tennessee.At the time the poem arrived, in February 2008, I was reading a book called “Storm Warning” by Nancy Mathis about the tornados that hit Oklahoma on May 3rd 1999, one of which was a mile wide with winds of over 300mph, the fastest ever recorded. Although the poem came with no explanation of what it was about or what inspired it, I, no doubt heavily influenced by what I had just been reading, imagined it as being written from the perspective of a child feeling relatively safe in a storm-shelter while a tornado wreaks havoc outside. The words have a beautiful simplicity and a dream-like quality.Rachel confirms that she has witnessed a tornado. Although Tennessee is relatively low on the list of states at risk having on average just 12 annually, the Hendersonville area was hit by an F3 tornado on 7th April 2006.“… the tornado continued into Sumner County just north of Hendersonville. It damaged numerous houses in that area before entering and devastating Gallatin with F3 damage at about 2:30 pm CDT. Several entire subdivisions, primarily along the north shore of Old Hickory Lake were destroyed or flattened, killing nine people and injuring 121. Over 700 houses were damaged or destroyed, including about 80 in Hendersonville.” (Wikipedia)The music for The Scissored Ground was written on the 25th February 2008. It uses an EADGAD tuning.

Of all the figures in American history, surely the most iconic is ‘The Cowboy’. A significant branch of the burgeoning film industry was dedicated to making movies, ‘Westerns’, to tell his story.Yet for the most part these ‘Cowboy and Indian’ romps did the cowboy a great disservice. The plots were predictable, the characters two dimensional at best. The cowboys seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to wipe out the indigenous population who were used exclusively as bullet-fodder. Film cowboys were always white. And, given the nature of a cowboy’s work it was odd that cattle didn’t seem to feature much. On the plus side, the scenery was great! Gulches, mesas, passes (where people were forever being ‘cut off’), rocks, dust, tumbleweed and sand.But most mind-boggling of all were the ludicrously unnatural plants. There are, of course, no cacti native to the UK – and I’m certain that somewhere there’s a body of people who religiously believe that cacti are not, in fact, native to planet earth at all, and landed several millennia ago (probably in New Mexico) in a fleet of spaceships from whence they spread over the south west of the USA, and are, as we speak, quietly biding their time.In truth, whilst some of the long drives undertaken by the cowboys may have crossed such arid terrain, it didn’t happen often. And rather than fronting-up to the native population, the cowboys would sometimes go to extraordinary lengths to avoid crossing paths with them, and where this couldn’t be avoided, there were often tacit agreements between the Nations and the cowboys that helped avoid any confrontations.The drives sometimes took months and could cover literally thousands of miles with the cowboys spending endless hours in the saddle. It was a lonely, nomadic existence. They tended to be solitary, taciturn figures often on the run from a murky past. The money they received for a successful drive was usually spent, rarely judiciously, within days of the cattle arriving at their destination.It would be fair to say, therefore, that the cowboy lifestyle wasn’t exactly conducive to long-term relationships. And yet, whilst he wasn’t particularly given to romance, the cowboy remains the most romantic figure in US history and continues to haunt the American psyche.

This Trail Of Tears(words: trad. Music: Jamie Field & Evelyn Downing)

"Long time we travelled on way to new landPeople feel bad when we leave old nationChildren cry and womens' cryBut they say nothing and keep on towards the west."On this trail of tears.

The arcing melody line of the chorus is a direct reflection of the northern most route taken by the Cherokee as it appears on the map. The words of the verse are an edited version of recollections made a survivor of the march.This Trail of Tears is one of the earliest songs written for American Images and has been through many recorded versions. We have chosen to release this stripped back version that focuses on the story it tells.

The United States was built on the sweat of millions of unheralded men and woman, often immigrants who came through Ellis Island, and who seem largely forgotten, airbrushed out of the history of the nation.Comes and Goes was the last piece to be written for the American Images project. I realised that we didn’t have a song relating to New York, and rather than write something along the lines of “New York! New York! It’s a wonderful town!” I opted for a more reflective look at the other side of the city – not the glittering, bright lights, but the darker, hidden side where the vast majority of its citizens live, many just trying to get by.To reflect the nature of the lyrics and the folk-like melody, I wanted to keep this track austere, as simple as possible - just Evelyn’s sublime vocals, Colin’s restrained piano, a subtle accordion, and Wendy’s gorgeous oboe solo.Although it’s set in New York, on reflection I guess it’s actually a piece for the anonymous, unsung millions of people in the United States. To borrow from Jackson Browne: ‘It’s a song for ‘Everyman’.